‘Lost’: More questions and the show’s never been better

Man, talk about answering questions only to spawn many more questions.

This show isn’t so much a puzzle as it is a maze. In a puzzle, we’d see the scope of things. We’d see the boundaries. How many missing pieces there are. Just how far this thing goes. “Lost” is more of a maze, in that watching the show is a journey, and just when we solve one area of the maze, it opens up, and now there are more doors to open and explore.

What “The Man Behind the Curtain” showed more than anything is, while there is this history of the island, how we saw the Dharma Initiative in its heyday, that what’s happening now with Ben and The Others and Jack and the survivors is very much an important piece to the island’s timeline. Early, we were led to believe The Others were in total control. Now, Jack’s crew is starting to figure things out. Jack’s crew is starting to dictate events on the island.

A sub-point of the episode was how the writers again tried to shed some sympathy upon an Other, in this case the leader, Ben. We saw his birth, his mother dying, his absentee father and Annie and how she was the only one in the world who remembered his birthday. But, unlike the Juliet flashbacks, they didn’t make too much of a case for Ben after he shot Locke. Still, I must address a certain point.

Yes, The Others are people, too. They all have people they love. And they are all people. Some of them are, like Juliet, desperate to get off the island. But they are still the enemy. And they still have to be eliminated. I’m sure some of the Nazis were really fun guys, really stand up people. But they were the enemy. And they had to go.

Is it just me, but is the Dharma Initiative all of a sudden so irrelevant? It was never really a threat to anything, was it? They brought some heavy-duty toys to the island — like the thing that imploded the hatch and caused a rift in the Space Time Continuum — but for the most part, they were just a bunch of hippies feeding opium to polar bears.

It’s The Others that are so relevant. Why were they on the island on the first place? How long before the Dharma Initiative was established were they living there? Did they have the same goal as they do now, to produce a human child? How did Ben become the leader? Where did they live before wiping out the Dharma Initiative? Were they masquerading as indigenous people to the Dharma Initiative, just as they did to survivors of the plane crash? Is this just a case of a good old-fashioned corporate brawl? Two companies, one island, not enough room for the both of them, someone’s gotta go, who’s gonna notice?

There is definitely something supernatural about the island. The haunting whispering (thank you Closed Captioning), the black smoke, and people who are supposed to be dead popping up at inopportune times. But not every weird thing that happens can go straight into the supernatural file. There’s a plausible explanation for most things than happen on the island. Like Mikhail coming back from the dead. Of course, the dial was closer to the green than the red. And we now know The Others weren’t doing the whispering, it was the island.

So many questions, not enough room: Who is Jacob? What is Jacob? What about Ben’s reaction when Locke told him what Jacob said? Is Locke dead? Can Locke die as long as he’s on the island?